The study is a phonetic analysis of the vowels, diphthongs and triphthongs in Meixian Hakka. The formant measurements as well as the temporal organization are presented. Results show that (1) the relative distance between the mid vowels and the high vowels differ in male and female speech in Meixian Hakka; (2) diphthongs in Meixian Hakka may be separated into two categories according to the dif...

Three psycho-acoustical experiments were carried out to investigate relative importance of formant frequency and whole spectral shape as cues for vowel perception. Four types of vowel-like signals were presented to eight listeners. The mean responses for stimuli including both formant and amplitude-ratio feature were quite similar to those for the stimuli including only formant peak feature. No...

Landmark based speech processing is a component of Lexical Access From Features (LAFF), a novel paradigm for feature based speech recognition. Detection and classi cation of landmarks is a crucial rst step in a LAFF system. This work tests the theoretical characteristics of vowels, and shows results for work in progress on a Vowel Landmark Detector. Acoustic theory predicts rst formant peaks in...

Identification of place of articulation in the synthesized syllables /bi/, /di/, and /gi/ was examined in three groups of listeners: (a) normal hearers, (b) subjects with high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss, and (c) normally hearing subjects listening in noise. Stimuli with an appropriate second formant (F2) transition (moving-F2 stimuli) were compared with stimuli in which F2 was constan...

Corpus data from the Audio British National Corpus was used to compare the acoustics of British English stops with velar and/or labial articulation in onset positions preceding back rounded vowels. The acoustics of labialized velar stops in British English have not commonly been described due to their frequent phonological analysis as clusters. Labialized velars have been characterized cross-li...

Two speech processor programs (MAPs) differing only in electrode frequency boundary assignments were created for each of eight Nucleus 24 Cochlear Implant recipients. The default MAPs used typical frequency boundaries, and the experimental MAPs reassigned one additional electrode to vowel formant regions. Four objective speech tests and a questionnaire were used to evaluate speech recognition w...

The present paper investigates the recoverability of detailed spectral features such as formant and burst peak frequencies of prevocalic stop consonants in noise excited channel vocoded speech for bandwidths ranging from 250-2000 Hz. It is shown that some formant frequency information is still recoverable up to 1000 Hz. This challenges the claim that listeners must necessarily rely primarily on...

We present a method for estimating the vocal-tract area function from specified formant frequencies. The method extends the work of Story (J.A.S.A., 119, 715-718, 1996) based on a sensitivity function representing the change in the formant frequency due to a small perturbation of the cross-sectional area of the vocal tract. Our method estimates the vocal-tract shape through an iterative procedu...

Formant tracking has been an intensively studied topic in speech research. In the work reported in this paper formants and their tracks are used for analyzing and modifying the spectral content of speech. The algorithm is based on linear prediction (LP) analysis, on finding the roots of the all-pole filter, and on a constraint-based mapping between poles, formants and formant tracks. Formant fr...

The "singer's formant" is a prominent spectrum envelope peak near 3 kHz, typically found in voiced sounds produced by classical operatic singers. According to previous research, it is mainly a resonatory phenomenon produced by a clustering of formants 3, 4, and 5. Its level relative to the first formant peak varies depending on vowel, vocal loudness, and other factors. Its dependence on vowel f...